The world has changed dramatically over the last 18 months. Organisations are turning every cent over and being more cautious about what they spend their investments on.
So said Simon Carpenter, director of strategic initiatives at SAP SA, who demonstrated the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) during the ITWeb SOA conference, held this week at The Campus, in Bryanston.
Carpenter said SOA will make the ability to govern organisations much easier to do in future, because of its ability to drive flexibility within the organisation, creating competitive advantage.
“Business people are starting to understand the potential for IT to transform the business. From a business point of view, SOA is about driving quantifiable benefits. Process execution time is reduced from eight days to 60 seconds via new self-service and reduced error rate.”
According to Carpenter, the main factors reshaping companies are the deregulation and opening up of protected markets, technology such as SOA which enables work to be rapidly transferred, increased market consumption but challenged margins, and globalisation of low-cost competition.
Real value
Carpenter said he disagreed with Gartner's 2009 BPM/SOA hype cycle graph, which states SOA is on the slope of enlightenment. “I think SOA is still in the trough of disillusionment. However, business process management (BPM) will take SOA out of this trough and show organisations how to leverage SOA to bridge the gap between IT and business.”
“However, organisations can use these troubled times as an opportunity to change the game, make a disruption and take advantage of their competitors.”
According to Carpenter, organisations can use SOA to position the business for when the upturn comes.
“We find it rare today for a CFO or CEO to sign off an acquisition of software without a robust business case. It's tough out there, and companies need to become focused on projects and investments resulting in real value. SOA can provide real business benefits for IT as well as the enterprise as a whole.”
According to Gartner, SOA was used in more than 50% of large new applications and business processes designed in 2007. The Economist Intelligence Unit 2008 claims IT's primary strategic focus will shift from cost efficiency to revenue growth, and relatively quickly.
Within the next three years, 69% of companies will see revenue growth as their primary focus versus 31% looking to drive cost efficiency.
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